Ruth Kassinger’s A Garden of Marvels

Read the book, meet the author

By Leigh Glenn

Gardeners don’t need degrees in botany. But knowing a little botany — plus a bit about the history of human relationships with plants — creates a deeper gardening experience. Just ask local author Ruth Kassinger.
Kassinger takes a warm and humorous approach to the green world in her book A Garden of Marvels: The Discovery that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of the Way Plants Work. From her own adventures growing citrus at our latitude to chasing down a chimeric animal-algal slug that makes its food by photosynthesizing, Kassinger uses easy-to-understand language to graft multiple tales of plant evolution onto a single trunk of a story that highlights plant survival strategies. The forerunners of today’s plants made the world habitable for multicellular forms of life, including us.
Kassinger teaches reverence for the adaptability of plants and trees and for their different parts, from the relationship between fungi and roots to the chloroplasts that make up the leaves.
Meet the woman behind the book Sunday, Nov. 9, at Caritas Society’s Meet the Authors fundraiser to help St. John’s College students. Two other writers reach out to fiction and history readers: Barbara Rogan, author of A Dangerous Fiction, and Steve Vogel author of Through the Perilous Fight: Six Weeks that Saved the Nation. 3pm at Key Auditorium. $40 w/discounts: 410-533-8383.